“Well, yes, ah, from a distance.”
Flick. A golden man in black oriental garb sewn with greengage daggers swung a curved sword into the air, and was transfixed. The camera raced to him. At about four feet away, he ceased being a man. You saw the impervious metal of his skin—which was hard as the veneer of a heatproof saucepan.
“The skin is always the giveaway,” said Swohnson, as the camera slid along the canyon of a metallic eyelid, its lashes like black lacquer spikes. “And, although they looked quite real at their routines, the head movements, the walk, always let them down.”
Flick. A copper-skinned man in yellow velvet strode across the screen. You could just see it, the stiltedness, and once having seen it, you could see nothing else.
“The crazy thing is,” said Swohnson, “the public hysteria that got stirred up, the day we introduced these robots to the city. A publicity gimmick—but what a surprise—”
“Yes, indeed.” (The interviewer.) “A kind of myth was created, wasn’t it? Totally autonomous robots who could find their own way about.”
“Naturally,” (Swohnson) “every robot had a human attendant, however circumspect. They could hardly have managed otherwise. Absurd, the things people actually credited our robots with. Oh, yes, er, they were clever, the best yet—but no machine can do the things our robots were supposed to have done. Traveled on flyers alone, taken ferries, subways—”
Flick. Old film, and I knew it. A crowd of demonstrators in East Arbor, the police lights playing over them. Someone threw a bottle. The camera followed it. It hit the facade of Electronic Metals and shattered.
I must have made a sound. Silver took my palm between his cool fingers, which felt of human skin.
“It’s all right.”
“It isn’t. Don’t you see—wait,” I said.
Swohnson was back on the screen.
“Whatever else, the final failure of E.M. will please those people out there who got scared by what we did—or what they thought we did.”
“E.M. has egg on its face, then?” The newsman. Pleased. Congratulatory.
“A lot of egg. We found out the hard way. These ultra-sophisticated machines use up so much energy, they just short out.”
Flick. A golden girl, dancing. A spray of electric static. A metal statue, poised at an unearthly angle, one leg extended, her hair in her eyes. Stupid, ungainly. Laughable. A machine that couldn’t be as good as any human, that couldn’t even finish its act.
(“Some run-down heap,” said Clovis, “that will probably permanently seize up as it walks through the door. Or at some other, more poignant, crucial moment.”)
As if he read my mind, the interviewer said: “And surely, how shall I put it, these things had a friendly social function as well. A standin for a girlfriend, perhaps. Awkward if your girlfriend seized up like that.”
“Um. It could have happened.”
“Oh, dear,” said the interviewer.
Swohnson grinned. The grin said: Hit me again, I love it.
“So I guess we remain,” said the interviewer, “the superior species, to date. Man stays at the top of the heap as artist and thinker. And lover?”
“Um,” said Swohnson.
“And dare I ask, what are E.M.’s plans for the future?”
“Ah. We’re thinking of moving out of state. Somewhere east. Farm machinery for derelict agricultural areas.”
“And will any of your tractors have a winning smile?”
“Only if some maniac paints one on.”
And flick, there was a cartoon filling the screen. It showed a metal tractor with a great big smile, eyelashes and long, long golden hair.
I shut my eyes and opened them. The snow dazzled, and I turned in fear to see if anyone but us had stopped to watch the local news broadcast. A drunk rolled across the street, oblivious, slipping. In the sky high above, a distant string of jewels revealed the approach of a flyer. The city roared gently to itself on every side. But it didn’t really matter who had seen the visual here. All over the city people had seen it. Seen it, but believed it?
“Very strange,” Silver murmured.
“I’m scared.”
“I know you are. Why?”
“Don’t you see?”
“Maybe.”
“Let’s go home,” I said. “Please. Quickly.”
We walked in silence, cloaks brushing the snow, like two Renaissance princes. And every time we had to pass someone, I was afraid. Will they recognize him? Will they confront us?
But how could they? Hadn’t the news bulletin just told them that a robot can never be mistaken for a human? Go close, you’ll see the skin like a saucepan, hard, hard metal. (I had lain closer than any camera, or treated still shot designed to deceive. Skin which was poreless, yet not lifeless, smooth but not hard. Metallic, but not metal…) And the walk, disjointed, a little stiff, and the ungainly gestures which always gave them away—a puppet, slightly out of control. And the inability to find its own way about the city. To decide for itself. All those of us who saw those robots that day when they walked among us, did we all now believe that we’d made a great big silly mistake? Yes. Why not? We believe what we want to, don’t we. And no one wants to believe the machines that take the jobs away from those of us that need jobs could also take our songs away, our fantasies, our lovers.
Someone had told Electronic Metals what it had to do and what it had to say. And Swohnson, as ever in the hot seat, had done it and said it. Lies. Logical, credible, soothing lies. How much compensation had the City Marshal been authorized to pay E.M.? A lot. They’d had to take their most exciting product off the market. They’d had to mess about with it until it gave an efficient display of being useless, for the benefit of the visual cameras. And then—and then, no doubt, they’d dismantled it. Golden torsos dismembered, golden wheels turning where black eyes had looked out, or copper wheels, where golden eyes had looked out.
“Your teeth are chattering,” he said to me.